These Are the Restaurants Obsessed with Making You Feel Really, Really Special

What brings you in tonight?” Brian and Mark Canlis had some questions about that question. It was a Tuesday evening in Seattle, and customers were minutes away from coming through the front door for dinner at Canlis, a 67-year-old restaurant that overlooks Lake Union like a sleek black opera house designed by Alfred Hitchcock. As sunlight, filtered through pine and cedar branches, poured cinematically into the giant windows, the two brothers gathered their service team in a circle. They wanted to pick apart a little hospitality tic that seems gracious on the surface but can quickly curdle into an annoyance (or even an unintentional insult) if servers aren’t careful.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

They wanted to pick apart a little hospitality tic that seems gracious on the surface but can quickly curdle into an annoyance.

They offered up a scenario: A woman has taken her seat. A server asks her, “What brings you in tonight?” She replies that it is her birthday. Nice. But if that information is not conveyed immediately to the rest of the crew, the woman may be asked again. And again. “What brings you in tonight?” Suddenly, it seems as though no one is listening.

“That’s the worst—a guest not feeling cared for,” Brian said. “The next four or five times break your soul. It’s a lazy question.”

“It means we haven’t thought through the next step,” Mark went on. Canlis, like Michael’s in Santa Monica and Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, is that rare breed: It’s an older American restaurant that has managed to surge into a second life instead of being disrupted and derailed by the bombardments of change. Brian and Mark, who are 39 and 43, respectively, deserve credit for that resurrection. After leaving careers in the military to take over the restaurant when their parents grew weary of it, the brothers, against all odds, turned a fussy-uncle Seattle institution into one of the coolest places to eat on the West Coast.

Mark, left, and Brian are Canlis’s current owners.

Canlis

They’ve done so in nearly imperceptible ways. Listen closely to the piano player—that’s right, he’s playing a haunting version of “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies. Consider the rabbit sausage with buttermilk and mustard greens, or the æbleskiver (sort of a Danish version of a hush puppy) crowned with a cocked beret of caviar—that’s the handiwork of Brady Williams, a young chef whom the Canlis brothers recruited from Blanca and Roberta’s, the twin capitals of haute hipster cooking in Brooklyn. Brian and Mark recently spent almost a million dollars to renovate the bar. In the old days, a regular might’ve settled for a rum and Coke, but now there’s a hardcore cocktail list—concise, inviting, on-trend. Earlier this year, Tan Vinh of The Seattle Times described Canlis’s Almost Perfect cocktail as “sorcery.” Weeks later, Nelson Daquip, the restaurant’s wine and spirits director, took home a James Beard Award.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

“The next four or five times break your soul. It’s a lazy question.”

Ultimately, though, the thing that has kept Canlis alive—and has led to its being name-checked in the company of Eleven Madison Park and Blue Hill at Stone Barns—is what was on display at that staff meeting: a fanatical, granular obsession with hospitality. These are tough times for fancy restaurants, we are told. The kids want food trucks and noodle shops. Antiquated modes of service are doomed. Well . . . action, meet reaction: The fast-casual shakeout of the past decade has fostered a pushback. Restaurant builders like the Boka Restaurant Group in Chicago and Union Square Hospitality in New York (led by service swami Danny Meyer, whose 2006 book, Settling the Table, is treated as sacred scripture) are doubling down on the idea of being really, really nice to people.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

When it works, it can feel like telepathy—“being attuned to what our guests need before they need it,” in the words of Todd Thurman, the general manager of the Los Angeles branch of Craft—but what it often hinges on is technology. If you’re a repeat customer at Craft, you might notice that the waiter already knows whether you want lemon in your iced tea. That’s because a haikulike portrait of your preferences has been tapped into a database, often via OpenTable or another reservation service.

At Canlis, too, the team tends to have a sense of where each customer is coming from, and it has a meeting every night to anticipate that. As Mark Canlis put it, “You’ve got to get your mind ahead of the question.” There’s a science to it, but when it’s seamless it feels like sorcery.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.